I Want to be Everything

Hi 😅 Before you read this, I should warn you that there's an audio version attached. It's my first time recording something on my own, so it's a little awkward 😭. If you'd rather read than try to decipher whatever I was doing with my voice, that's perfectly okay. But if you'd like to hear me read it to you... press play. 🤍 ________________ ‎I w‎ant to be everything.I want to do everything.‎‎The world keeps introducing me to new ways of being alive, and I fall in love with all of them.‎Some days I want to spend my life in hospitals, learning the language of the human body. Other days I want to disappear into a quiet café and write stories until the sun goes down. I want to paint badly until I paint well. I want to learn languages just to discover how differently people say "I miss you." I want to bake bread. I want to start a bookstore. I want to climb mountains I can't pronounce. I want to live in cities that make me feel small and forests that make me feel found.‎I don't have one dream.‎I have a city full of them.‎Someone once told me not to get complacent.‎I almost laughed. Then I almost cried.‎They have no idea how dissatisfied I am with myself.‎I don't hate who I am. I just know there's so much more of me waiting to exist.‎People keep asking when I became so ambitious, so hungry.‎The truth is, they have the wrong word.‎I'm not hungry.‎I'm starving.‎I don't just want a successful career or a beautiful life. I want to squeeze every drop out of this existence before it slips through my fingers. I want to know what it's like to wake up in unfamiliar cities. To make things with my hands. To master skills that seem impossible today. To meet people whose lives rearrange the furniture in my mind. To create something that outlives me. To fail spectacularly. To begin again. To love deeply. To keep becoming, and becoming, and becoming...‎Sometimes my dreams feel so close I can almost taste them. ‎It's the strangest feeling, as though if I reached out just a little farther, my fingertips would brush against the life I've been imagining.‎Maybe my hunger has less to do with ambition than it does with deprivation.‎I've spent so much of my life feeling limited that now I ache for limitlessness.‎I don't just want freedom.‎I want the experience of freedom.‎I want a life that stretches in every direction, one that refuses to be contained by fear, circumstance, or the walls that once convinced me the world was smaller than it really is.‎That's why I want everything, because, for so long, enough was all I was allowed to imagine.‎Sometimes I think the hardest part of growing up isn't making decisions. It's realizing that every decision quietly buries another version of your life.‎Every yes is a thousand no's.‎Say yes to science, and somewhere a novelist packs away her unfinished manuscript. Say yes to writing, and somewhere a scientist wonders what she might have discovered. Choose one city, and a hundred others become places you'll only ever visit in your imagination.‎No one prepares you for the grief of unlived lives.‎It's a strange kind of mourning, to miss people you never became. To wonder about homes that only exist in alternate versions of your future. To catch yourself imagining a life so vividly that you almost forget it isn't yours.‎Sometimes I wonder if curiosity is a gift or a form of homesickness for lives I've never had the chance to live.‎Maybe that's why I collect hobbies like pressed flowers. Why I read about careers I'll never have. Why I stop to imagine the life of the woman reading alone by the train window, or the man opening his little flower shop before sunrise. I don't just want to know about their lives.‎For a moment, I want to become them.‎Maybe that's what it means to be human; to constantly outgrow the borders of your own imagination, only to discover there are still more lives waiting just beyond it.‎There's something almost laughable about all of this.‎I want a life without limits.‎And yet I have spent so much of my own life limited by myself.‎I'm shy. I'm anxious. I'm awkward.‎Painfully so.‎Maybe it's because I care too much.‎I've wanted to ask for help and swallowed the words instead. I've wanted to introduce myself and convinced myself not to. I've wanted to make the first move, to break those boundaries. I've wanted to take up space, only to shrink back into the corners of myself where everything felt safer.‎It's strange, isn't it?‎To dream of a life so vast while inhabiting yourself so quietly.‎People look at ambition as if it's loud, as if it announces itself before entering a room.‎Mine never has.‎Mine whispers.‎It whispers while my hands shake.‎It whispers when I'm too afraid to send the email, publish the piece, ask for help, or walk through the door.‎It whispers, Go anyway. Try. Do it.‎I know I won't become everything.‎A single lifetime is both impossibly long and heartbreakingly short.‎But the goal is simply to remain curious enough that life never becomes smaller than my wonder.‎To let every dream change me, even if I never chase it to the end.‎To borrow pieces from all the people I could have been and weave them into the one person I get to be.‎I don't want another life. I just wish this one came with enough chances to live all the ones I'm dreaming of.‎And I hope, when I look back on my life, I can say I was brave enough to become more than I was yesterday.

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